{"id":388,"date":"2018-10-22T04:54:09","date_gmt":"2018-10-22T04:54:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.piboxproject.com\/?p=388"},"modified":"2018-10-22T04:54:09","modified_gmt":"2018-10-22T04:54:09","slug":"denver-maker-faire","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.piboxproject.com\/index.php\/2018\/10\/22\/denver-maker-faire\/","title":{"rendered":"Denver Maker Faire"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"It’s been quite some time since I posted an update on PiBox.\u00a0 Many things have happened since then: we moved from Colorado Springs to Broomfield (just outside of Boulder) and bought a new house, I changed jobs and, sadly, Bailey passed away (our 2nd oldest golden retriever).\u00a0 It’s been a tough year.\u00a0 But we’re settled in and things we’re getting back into a new set of routines.\u00a0 And with Cody, our last golden, by our side we’re making progress on many fronts.<\/p>\n

Some of the progress went into PiBox.\u00a0 The core platform has become very stable and so has the media center.\u00a0 The console webcam, which had never worked as well as the browser based webcam, now works with no lag at all thanks to improvements in the upstream omxplayer from the Raspberry Pi Foundation.\u00a0 And more important, work has begun and made big strides in the home automation features being developed for the Ironman project.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

I demo’d all the new and updated features at the Denver Maker Faire<\/a>, which ran over the October 13-14, 2018 weekend at the National Western Complex in Denver, Colorado.\u00a0 The crowd was big and the response was very good though it’s clear I need to update the web site to get better information out on what exactly PiBox is and how it is evolving.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

This was my first chance in a while to work on a dialog describing the project.\u00a0 I was able to work out a description of why I’m doing this and what it’s all about.\u00a0 But I found it interesting that most people had the same three basic comments.<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. I have RPis but I don’t know what to do with them<\/li>\n
  2. I have a similar project<\/li>\n
  3. That’s impressive – it’s like a lot of work<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    The first was by far the most common.\u00a0 Lots of people are buying Raspberry Pi’s but don’t really know what to do with them.\u00a0 A Pi isn’t really a desktop computer but it isn’t really a phone and so they aren’t quite sure what they can do with them.\u00a0 I see this as an opportunity to show them how PiBox can be used to expand their horizons by showing how a custom software stack can make a Pi into just about anything.<\/p>\n

    \"\"The second comment was far less common but did come up a number of times.\u00a0 Most of those who are working on a similar project are using Raspbian and Kodi.\u00a0 It was easy to explain to those visitors to the PiBox booth how heavy weight that solution is and how a custom PiBox solution could do similar things, even without Internet access.<\/p>\n

    The last comment was usually what I heard from people who stayed long enough to hear the whole PiBox story, especially when I showed them the software stack and explained how so much of it is custom code I’d written.\u00a0 Those visitors tended to be have more technical backgrounds and a few were interested in working on joint projects or at least a sharing of ideas.<\/p>\n

    Another fun item from the show:\u00a0 lots of kids – say 10-18, plus a number of college students – stopped by and were really interested in what PiBox is all about.\u00a0 Some were quite impressive in their knowledge of Pis and Arduinos.\u00a0 I was very excited to see this, especially from several young ladies.\u00a0 We need more young people diving into the guts of the full software stack and not just floating around in the LAMP and web arena.<\/p>\n

    Finally, I had this one question pop up frequently:\u00a0 why did you do this?\u00a0 It was interesting to see the looks on their faces when I said I just wanted to know how to do it?\u00a0 These were all people interested in Making, creating things because you can.\u00a0 And I think I helped show that deep dives don’t have to be just because you get paid for it.\u00a0 It can also be just for the fun of learning.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    PiBox made it’s Denver debut at the Denver Maker Faire and the reception was awesome!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":407,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-388","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-uncategorized","8":"czr-hentry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.piboxproject.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/10\/makerfair_robot_waving.png?fit=612%2C612&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8du2Y-6g","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.piboxproject.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/388","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.piboxproject.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.piboxproject.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.piboxproject.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.piboxproject.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=388"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.piboxproject.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/388\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":411,"href":"https:\/\/www.piboxproject.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/388\/revisions\/411"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.piboxproject.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/407"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.piboxproject.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=388"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.piboxproject.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=388"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.piboxproject.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=388"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}